Katutura, located in Namibia's major urban center and capital, Windhoek, was a township created by apartheid, and administered in the past by the most rigid machinery of the apartheid era. Namibia became a sovereign state in 1990, and Katutura reflects many of the changes that have taken place. No longer part of a rigidly bounded social system, people in Katutura today have the opportunity to enter and leave as their personal circumstances dictate. Influenced in recent years by significant urban migration and the changing political and economic situation in the new South Africa, as well as a myriad of other factors, this diverse community has held special interest for the author who did fieldwork there for several years prior to 1975. Pendleton's recent visits provide a rich comparison of life in Katutura township during the peak of the apartheid years and in the post-independence period. In his systematic look at urbanization, poverty, stratification, ethnicity, social structure, and social history, he provides a compassionate view of the survivors of the unstable years of apartheid.

This study examines the relationship between the People's Republic of China and the people of East Turkistan; specifically, between China's settler colonialism and East Turkistan's independence movement. What distinguishes this study is its dispassionate analysis of the East Turkistan's national dilemma in terms of international law and legal precedent as well as the prudence with which it distinguishes substantial evidence from claims of China's crimes against humanity and genocide in East Turkistan that have not been fully verified yet. The author demonstrates how other states have ignored the nature of that relationship and so avoided asking key questions about East Turkistan that have been asked and answered about other occupied and colonized states. The book analyzes this situation and provides the tools and the argument to understand East Turkistan's actual status in the international community. Currently, the world has bought into China's rhetoric about "stability" and "fighting extremism," and international organizations accept China's presentation of Uyghurs and other people as "minorities" within a Chinese nation-state. This book instead shows East Turkistan can correctly be understood through history and law as an illegally occupied territory undergoing genocide. It also makes the case that East Turkistani people had basis advancing territorial claim for independence.

This account covers so many sites-a railway station in Berlin, Germany in 1933, a penthouse overlooking the mountains that surround Genoa, Italy, the World War II experience of picking cotton while an Athens, GA, high school student, to Atlanta, to St. Louis, to Chicago and eventually to the newly formed city of Sandy Springs, GA, which she created and leads as Mayor.

The major issues of life in America for the past 60 years are addressed through the life of an unusual lady with humor as well as mature perception. The struggle between labor and management, the women's movement (we've got to get out into the world), the racial conflicts that engulfed the nation and especially the South, and the conflict between central cities and their suburbs, and finally the sometimes ridiculous aspects of politics all come alive as Eva narrates the twists and turns of her unusual life.

Lack of religious enthusiasm is a universal nemesis with long-ranging effects. In Those Challenging Cracks of Secularism, author Rev. Oliver O. Nwachukwu shows how secularism can further deepen dividing lines among people.

The negatives solicited by indifference to authentic religious values and the erroneous use of force to enlist membership by religious extremists are two extremities "Those Challenging Cracks of Secularism" opposes in the search for ultimate truth. Aggrieved by the negative effects of competing alliances on core Christian religious teachings and values, the book discusses the recent ecclesiastical wrangling in the Episcopal Church that began with the ordination of gay priests and blessing of same-sex union.

It further treats the recent clerical sex abuse scandal, allegations of cover-up, the financial burdens on the affected dioceses, as well as homosexuality in the priesthood. The mythological anabasis of the Old Testament books have often been interpreted wrongfully by fanatics to engage in senseless killings of innocent people in the name of God, something that has led to the mistaken practice of shutting religion off public places as private.

No one should be denied the privilege of close relationship with God through attitude of religious indifference. Economic obsessions, technological enslavement, proliferations of arms, racial intolerance and unbridled political correctness have diluted religious values so much that people are constantly burdened with mistrust and skepticism.

Politicians and pundits regularly invoke the Bible in social and political debates on a host of controversial social and political issues, including: abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage, the death penalty, separation of church and state, family values, climate change, income distribution, teaching evolution in schools, taxation, school prayer, aid for the poor, and immigration. But is the Bible often used out of context in these major debates? This book includes essays by fourteen biblical scholars who examine the use of the Bible in political debates, uncovering the original historical contexts and meanings of the biblical verses that are commonly cited. The contributors take a non-confessional approach, rooted in non-partisan scholarship, to show how specific texts have at times been distorted in order to support particular views. At the same time, they show how the Bible can sometimes make for unsettling reading in the modern day. The key questions remain: What does the Bible really say? Should the Bible be used to form public policy?

The 2000 presidential election underscored the reality that outcomes in presidential contests do not necessarily follow from the votes cast by American voters. Under the Electoral College, a range of outcomes is possible, and what once might have seemed utterly remote now is clearly possible. Alexander Belenky has focused directly on what he calls extreme outcomes of our presidential elections. This topic is understudied and underanalyzed. He makes a real contribution in a timely way. -Dr. Norman Ornstein, CBS election analyst, American Enterprise Institute Sometimes it takes an "outsider's eye" to see the U.S. political system clearly, and Alexander Belenky's analysis of the presidential election system holds several remarkable surprises for me. Very few scholars have directly addressed fundamental flaws in the Electoral College's logic. Belenky lays bare several flaws. -Prof. David King, Institute of Politics, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University Colorado offers . awarding its nine electoral votes proportionate to the popular vote instead of winner take all . Colorado's "make your vote count" initiative seeks to put power in the popular vote . Could success in Colorado start a trend? . Electoral College experts aren't so certain . Alex Belenky, . who has written three books on the topic, including "Extreme Outcomes of U.S. Presidential Elections," says Colorado could prompt some states to dump winner-take-all but argues that the Electoral College is "flexible" and ought to remain in place-at least as a backup. One scenario he favors combines the popular vote and the Electoral College. "If there is at least 50 percent turnout of the electorate, then let the popular vote be decisive," he says, 'If there is not, then rely on the Electoral College." I like it. It's a good incentive to vote. -John Baer, Colo. Offering Electoral Change. Winner Wouldn't "Take All." Philadelphia Daily News, Sept. 28, 2004 ************************************************************************************** The Electoral College got a brief spate of attention in 2000. Many people realized then for the first time that we have a system in which the president is chosen not by the voters, but by 538 electors. It is a ridiculous setup, which thwarts the will of the majority, distorts presidential campaigning and has the potential to produce a true constitutional crisis. -(Abolish The Electoral College, The New York Times, Editorial, August 29, 2004) With another close presidential contest in store, that hardy if decipherable oddity of American Politics, The Electoral College is back in the news. . The Constitution requires someone to win a majority of the electoral votes; otherwise, the House chooses a president from the top three finishers. How do you think the public would react to the discovery that in such a contigent election, each state delegation has one vote, regardless of its size-the Democratic majority from California being matched by single Republican member from Delaware? . . I suspect this whole Electoral College issue is due for serious debate .. -(David Broder, Electoral College Alternatives Deserve Careful Scrutiny, The Seattle Times, Oct 21, 2004) One more surprising features of the controversy surrounding the 2000 election was its failure to spark any substantiated effort to abolish or reform the Electoral College. .The National Commission on Federal Election Reform, headed by former presidents Carter and Ford, decided early on not to even discuss the issue. "I think it is a waste of time to talk about changing the Electoral College," Carter observed. "I would predict that 200 years from now, we will still have the Electoral College'. -(Alexander Keyssar, Peculiar Institution, Boston Globe, October 17, 2004)

In this new edition of Overcoming America / America Overcoming, Stephen Rowe shows how the COVID-19 pandemic in tandem with Trumpism have brought basic dynamics of the American situation to high relief, and hence provide opportunity to address them - before it is too late. The dynamics he identifies are those of moral disease and political paralysis as symptomatic of the fact that America herself has been overtaken by the modern values which she exported to the rest of the world. He points to a way out of the current and potentially fatal malaise and violence: join other societies which are also struggling to move beyond the modern and consciously reappropriate those elements of tradition which have to do with cultivation of the mature human being. To avoid fundamentalism, Rowe discusses how this reappropriation must be undertaken in dialogue with those who also have come to recognize the unsustainable quality of the modern life, and who have been able to live beyond the nihilistic wish to tear it down. This book supports the call for an emerging global ethic and spirituality, providing resources of articulation and interpretation that allow for an ongoing dialogue between traditional and modern values-both worthy and problematic in their own ways-through which reliable policy and healthy living become possible.

Patrick Barr-Melej here illuminates modern Chilean history with an unprecedented chronicle and reassessment of the sixties and seventies. During a period of tremendous political and social strife that saw the election of a Marxist president followed by the terror of a military coup in 1973, a youth-driven, transnationally connected counterculture smashed onto the scene. Contributing to a surging historiography of the era's Latin American counterculture, Barr-Melej draws on media and firsthand interviews in documenting the intertwining of youth and counterculture with discourses rooted in class and party politics. Focusing on ""hippismo"" and an esoteric movement called Poder Joven, Barr-Melej challenges a number of prevailing assumptions about culture, politics, and the Left under Salvador Allende's ""Chilean Road to Socialism."" While countercultural attitudes toward recreational drug use, gender roles and sexuality, rock music, and consumerism influenced many youths on the Left, the preponderance of leftist leaders shared a more conservative cultural sensibility. This exposed, Barr-Melej argues, a degree of intergenerational dissonance within leftist ranks. And while the allure of new and heterodox cultural values and practices among young people grew, an array of constituencies from the Left to the Right berated counterculture in national media, speeches, schools, and other settings. This public discourse of contempt ultimately contributed to the fierce repression of nonconformist youth culture following the coup.

Christianity and Culture in the City: A Postcolonial Approach offers an introduction to the broad diversity of contemporary Christianities in a rich, complex, changing, and challenging city context. Cruz focuses upon a variety of changing communities with dynamic and striking cultural experiences, and the volume provides both scholarly and practical insights as to how Christianities in the city relate to and transform city institutions and communities that are undergoing dramatic shifts and invite opportunities for intentional study. This book offers a provocative interdisciplinary examination to shed light upon the ways in which diverse city communities appropriate Christianity to better engage their economic, cultural, political, and religious environment. A post-colonial theoretical framework will help inform how Christianity serves to empower and reinvent fragmented, oppressed, and struggling city populations. The reader is offered various conceptual, theoretical, and pragmatic insights and knowledge for better interpreting, affirming, and engaging diverse Christianities in the city in a postcolonial era.

This book explores five cases of monument and public commemorative space related to World War II (WWII) in contemporary China (Mainland), Hong Kong and Taiwan, all of which were built either prior to or right after the end of the War and their physical existence still remains. Through the study on the monuments, the project illustrates past and ongoing controversies and contestations over Chinese nation, sovereignty, modernism and identity. Despite their historical affinities, the three societies in question, namely, Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, vary in their own ways of telling, remembering and forgetting WWII. These divergences are not only rooted in their different political circumstances and social experiences, but also in their current competitions, confrontations and integrations. This book will be of great interest to historians, sinologists and analysts of new Asian nationalism.

When the controversial book, "Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications," was published in 1955, it made waves across the fields of communications, public opinion research, political science, and marketing. Written by Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, "Personal Influence" became the canonical statement of the two-step flow of communication, which posits that mass media flow to opinion leaders, who in turn influence the behavior and opinions of people around them.

Throughout the last half of a century, "Personal Influence" has undergone rigorous critique, appeared in numerous citations, and become a key text in the history of mass communications. Why is a rereading of this text relevant now?

Upon the 50th anniversary of the publishing of "Personal Influence," the editors of this volume of "The ANNALS "believed it was an ideal time to reflect upon the book s mid-century contexts and contemporary drawing upon enrichments of the field provided by feminism, critical and cultural studies, the new historicism, and progress in the social sciences. This unique volume of "The ANNALS" crosses generational, disciplinary, and national boundaries to piece together and pull apart a historically important text and use it to shed light on the contemporary environment.

Essays in this volume analyze the personalities who played key roles in the making of "Personal Influence," their origins and social identities, the institutional organization of research in which it evolved, and the disciplinary consequences of its success. Other authors reread Katz and Lazarfeld s classic as a way to explore the relations between citizenship and consumption, the nature of media and political involvement today, and the relevance of the two-step flow paradigm for the study of contemporary audiences, social networks, and public campaigns.

A must-read for scholars, students, and professionals in the fields of communication, public opinion, political science, sociology, and marketing, this volume of "The ANNALS" dusts off a time-worn text and renews its significance in the field of mass communications with modern scholarly perspectives and contemporary methodology experience, inspiring a fresh outlook on this historical force. "

The debate over the federal budget-and the deficit spending it tends to produce-has assumed a renewed urgency for reasons that are painfully clear to all of us. Over the past thirty-two years-from the presidency of Jimmy Carter through that of George W. Bush-the U.S. government has in fact balanced its budget in only four of them, while the fiscal challenges confronting President Obama make a balanced budget anytime soon a remote possibility. Iwan Morgan's book provides a much-needed historical perspective on this perennially troubling issue.

The prominent role of Congress notwithstanding, Morgan closely examines the role of presidents in the emergence of large federal budget deficits in the 1970s and 1980s, the reduction of the deficit problem in the 1990s, and its resurrection in the early twenty-first century. He focuses in particular on presidential budget policy to show how, over five administrations, deficit reduction merely complemented rather than took precedence over political priorities-and how Democrats came to support deficit reduction as necessary to preserve the liberal state, while Republicans largely tolerated deficits in order to safeguard their tax programs. Along the way, he considers such curiosities as why Carter and Clinton sought to reduce the deficit at a high level of revenue while Reagan and Bush 43 took the low road, and why Reagan and Bush 41 pressed for constitutional change prohibiting unbalanced budgets while Carter and Clinton opposed such an amendment.

Through this historical perspective, Morgan offers an innovative analysis of the relationship between presidential budget policy and the Federal Reserve's direction of monetary policy and probes the emerging link between America's domestic public indebtedness and external indebtedness. He also provides a fresh look at the growth of the entitlement state in a generally conservative era and the failure of efforts to place it on a secure financial footing.

The Age of Deficits boldly places the budget deficit at the center of modern American political history. Morgan clearly shows that, however much our recent leaders defined the deficit as a threat, their responses to it ultimately reflected their concern with reconciling its reduction with other elements of their governing agenda.

The first woman elected to lead a major Western power and the longest serving British prime minister for 150 years, Margaret Thatcher is arguably one the most dominant and divisive forces in 20th-century British politics. Yet there has been no overarching exploration of the development of Thatcher's views towards Northern Ireland from her appointment as Conservative Party leader in 1975 until her forced retirement in 1990. In this original and much-needed study, Stephen Kelly rectifies this. From Thatcher's 'no surrender' attitude to the Republican hunger strikes to her nurturing role in the early stages of the Northern Ireland peace process, Kelly traces the evolutionary and sometimes contradictory nature of Thatcher's approach to Northern Ireland. In doing so, this book reflects afresh on the political relationship between Britain and Ireland in the late-20th century. An engaging and nuanced analysis of previously neglected archival and reported sources, Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative Party and the Northern Ireland Conflict, 1975-1990 is a vital resource for those interested in Thatcherism, Anglo-Irish relations, and 20th-century British political history more broadly.

On October 30, 1990, Germany was formally reunified through an extension of the legal, political, and economic structures of West Germany into the former German Democratic Republic. For East Germans this transformation has been a challenging process. Former values, orientations, and standards have been subject to severe scrutiny as reunification has affected virtually every area of life.

Staab analyzes the development from the divided to the unified Germany and asks to what extent East Germans have adopted a national identity in line with that of the West Germans. He examines such identity markers as attitudes toward territory, economics, ethnicity, mass culture, and civic-political activity. Identifying a significant range of commonalities, he also finds striking features of mutually exclusive areas working to prevent a shared national identity. Scholars and other researchers dealing with German politics and contemporary history, political sociology, and nationalism will be interested in this book.

This book develops a theory of aesthetic fiction's impact on social identities. Throughout five case studies, the author develops the argument that social identities are nurtured by and may even emerge through the conflict between different aesthetic expressions. As it creates affective structures, narrative fiction enables the development and formation of political and cultural identities. This work is part of a field of research that deals with the aesthetics of the everyday and the idea of social aesthetics. It argues for a central role for the arts in the creation and formation of modern society. Social identities emerge in response to aesthetic-sensual patterns of perception. Focusing on five West German public debates in the years 1950 to 1990, this work sheds light upon the transformation of social reality through the discursive adaption of art.